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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28861758">Great Aunt who-now?</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Womble1/pseuds/Womble1'>Womble1</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Thunderbirds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Plaid shirts, great aunts, one size fits all</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:35:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>728</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28861758</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Womble1/pseuds/Womble1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Great aunt sends presents every year, does one size really fit all?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Great Aunt who-now?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For all that Tracy Island was pretty self contained, there were still pockets of extended family lurking around the globe. One such lurker was Great Aunt Isabelle, none of the boys were quite sure what the family relation was, she seemed to be one of those distant friends of the family who got absorbed along the way. But either way, every year they would be required to sign the Christmas card, and pose for a picture that Grandma would proudly send off, complete with a little round robin bragging note about the brothers. In return for this yearly offering they would receive a lumpy brown paper package towards the start of December - she was the sort of woman who had finished Christmas shopping by October. </p><p>The boys were beginning to wonder what sort of details Grandma was putting in that letter as the items in the package never seemed to bear much relation to the intended recipients. When Scott had been 10 she had sent 5 pocket calculators. Although baby Alan had given his some pretty enthusiastic chewing, so maybe she had been right. But in recent years it had been almost exclusively clothing. Great Aunt Isabelle didn't worry too much about sizes. She went on the theory that children were only ever going to get bigger, so they would grow into everything. Regardless of the fact that all save Alan had definitely seen their last growth spurt a while ago (much to Gordons disappointment). The year that she sent the Plaid Shirts she must have been assuming that they were all going to start growing sideways instead of upwards. Five shirts arrived, all in cheery Christmas red, and all with enough fabric to allow them to masquerade as duvet covers. What had Grandma been telling her about her “Strapping Grandsons”? They tested it and you could get John and Alan in one shirt if they were happy with one sleeve each. </p><p>Virgil was fine, he picked a shirt off the pile, rolled the sleeves up slightly and was ready for the obligatory group photo. The others needed to get a little more creative with their attire. Scott and John paired up and used clothes pegs to pull the excess fabric behind their backs. Making use of skills Scott had picked up during a summer job in a department store. Gordon decided to “own it” and pulled the long tails forward into a knot in true early Britney style and accessorised with a hip tilt that had him relegated to the back of the photo. Alan rolled the sleeves up as far as he could, which resulted in him having Popeye forearms, and then stuffed the rest of the baggy shirt down his boardshorts. Unfortunately they may have been visible at the hem every so slightly. </p><p>In the end they all looked such a state that Grandma had to shuffle them around to try and get a usable shot. The final image was mostly Virgil proudly sat in the centre, with his brother's heads popping up behind him. She was very glad that Great Aunt Isabelle wasn't keen on video calls, or this would have been much harder to stage. But it was done for another year. Virgil slowly gained all of the shirts, and since they were sturdy and protected his arms from stray cuts and scrapes when doing maintenance jobs he found himself wearing them more and more. With five in circulation there was usually one to hand on the top of his clean laundry pile. He wasn’t quite sure why everyone else made such a big deal about it, it wasn't like he'd been the one to buy them in bulk, but the damn things were seemingly bomb proof and didn't appear to wear out. </p><p>Maybe Great Aunt Isabelle was more observant than they gave her credit for because the following year the lumpy package contained five sets of grey skinny jeans so long and narrow that only space noodle John could make use of them. They decided against posing in the clothes for that year's photo, since no amount of creativity was going to get any part of Virgil into those jeans without being indecent. So John was the unwilling recipient of that years haul, and since he was rarely out of uniform they were likely to last even longer than the plaid shirts.</p>
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